Tissue Transplants

Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan is expected to act soon on a recommendation by Dr. James O. Mason, assistant secretary for health, to extend an 19-month-old ban on fetal tissue research, government sources said. Anti-abortion groups argue that to permit transplants of tissue from aborted fetuses would create a demand for the tissue, encouraging women to have abortions.

The House failed Wednesday to override President Bush's veto of legislation that would have ended a ban on fetal tissue research but supporters immediately introduced another bill aimed at allowing the work to proceed unimpeded. In an override vote of 271 to 156, supporters fell more than a dozen votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to enact the measure over the President's objection. So far, Congress has failed to override any of the President's vetoes.

A Texas couple who described themselves as anti-abortion told congressmen Monday, in often emotional testimony, why they decided to undergo a fetus-to-fetus tissue transplant in attempting to save their unborn child. "We do not agree with abortion," said the Rev. Guy Walden, a Baptist minister from Houston, his voice breaking at times. But "we believed that . . . this would be consistent with a pro-life, anti-abortion position." Theirs was the first public report of such surgery.

The Senate voted 85 to 12 Thursday to lift a government ban on the use of aborted fetuses in disease research, setting the stage for an expected veto by President Bush. The same measure passed the House last week on a 260-148 vote, which, unlike the Senate tally, is short of the two-thirds necessary to override the veto. Its supporters said fetal tissue holds the promise of new treatments for Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, diabetes and spinal cord injuries.

Dr. Edward Oldfield remembers the fall weekend in 1987 when he and Dr. Robert Plunkett, a fellow neurosurgeon at the National Institutes of Health, were preparing to take a historic step--performing the world's first fetal-cell transplant on a patient suffering from Parkinson's disease. Instead, less than 48 hours before the scheduled brain surgery on a middle-aged patient, the operation was canceled as a five-year moratorium began on federal aid for fetal-tissue research.

Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan has declined to rule on whether to extend the government's controversial ban on fetal-tissue research, an unexpected action that places responsibility for the decision with a lower official known to favor continuing the ban, health officials said Tuesday.

A man whose left hand was blown off while playing with a powerful firecracker 13 years ago received the first hand transplant in the United States. Hours later, the new hand was pink and warm. The 14 1/2-hour surgery, completed Monday, was the second such transplant ever. But doctors cautioned that the patient, Matthew David Scott, 37, had a high risk of blood clots and other complications in the first 24 hours.

An inherited human disorder that causes retardation and skeletal abnormalities has been cured in mice by the injection of a human gene, a researcher said last week. The technique cannot now be used in humans, but the experiment demonstrates that gene replacement is feasible for treating an important group of human disorders, said Edward Birkenmeier of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Me. "It works remarkably well," Birkenmeier said. "You can completely cure the mice."

Health officials continued to search Friday for 50 or more transplant recipients who may have received organs, tissue or bone grafts from a donor whose infection with the AIDS virus had gone undetected. While the potential danger of AIDS infection from organ transplants is not unknown, this is believed to be the largest number of patients affected by a single donor, federal health officials said.

The House approved legislation Thursday that would overturn a federal ban on fetal tissue research, but, in a politically significant victory for the Bush Administration, the vote fell short of the number needed to override an almost certain presidential veto. Although many supporters were absent for the vote, opponents--who object to the research because it involves tissue obtained through elective abortions--attracted three more votes than the one-third needed to sustain a veto.